How to NOT like you…

Once upon a time long since passed you asked me why I like you. The answer was easy. I like you because I do. Sure, I can try to go into the attributes that make me wish I was just a little bit prettier and just a little bit greater so that the reality of being your friend would magically morph into the fantasy of being yours. But none of this would answer the question as honestly as simply stating that I like you because of who you are.

This question, along with your affection, has been forgotten like the faded pages of a childhood fairytale. The one in it’s stead is much more difficult to answer. The true conundrum of life. How do I stop liking you? Because not liking you is something I’m not quite equipped to do. I wonder if that is a lesson we ever truly come to master?

Or is the truth more brutal than that? Is the shameful secret that one never really stops liking someone until all that is left is a heart that is an empty shell and a mind that is filled with unreturned niceties? And then what? You simply move on? And if that is the case, do you really move on, or just further away from it so that the perspective you lost in the heat of passion is restored and you realise that liking that one person was not really all that you thought it was cracked up to be?

How do I not like you, when I have liked you?

Is the truth maybe easier than that? Is it the more practical performance of posting a daily reminder to myself that I DON’T like you, until one day I believe it myself? Is it simply an off switch that is flicked and all of a sudden what I have felt is gone, like turning off a light when you stand in the middle of a room full of horror images. The darkness envelops the images and therefore it is like they are not there.

No, that cannot be it, because even in the darkness my mind is awake to the knowledge that those images are in fact there. Somehow the blackness of nothing makes the images feel more vivid and there they remain, etched in my memory like some sick shrine to that which is there but yet not there.

How to not like you…When I figure it out, I’ll turn the lights back on, and just maybe the walls will be white again, untarnished, ready for the next public exhibition of my foolish heart.